Gates Foundation : Friend or Foe
The curious case of philanthropic enemies
Ai as a cloak to hide data thieves
Shortly after demonetisation, the government was trying to make sense of all the data collected. The idea was to detect black money sources and plug tax leaks. The department came up with a tender calling for companies with data analysis abilities to quote. Most IT companies gave quotes upward of Rs 100 crores.
A startup claiming to be an Ai company suggested that they had this magical Ai technology which could speed analyse all the data and do it for 80% less. Indian tenders go to the lowest bidder. They did not have any Ai really. All they did was to steal the entire demonetisation database in the garb of Ai. In the end, the government and income tax got nothing. Seems the company couldn’t complete the assignment and didn’t get paid.
But what happened is that in the garb of ai, some of India’s most valuable data was stolen by a foreign owned company. Confidential data that pertained to millions of honest indian tax payers.
It didn’t stop there.
Three years later we had the covid pandemic. A subsidiary of the company quoted above now claimed to be a health ai company. Again the same con. It approached the mumbai municipality offering to analyse all hospital data to detect covid related information and trends. The progressive well meaning IAS officer immediately gave orders allowing them immediate data access.
Net net, they stole all the data and nothing came out of the ai. It seems the stolen data was all exported. The companies were primarily owned and controlled by foreign funds.
A lot of this is rumour. One hopes that it is not true. But what if it is. What is the fine line between philanthropy and theft. Down south we have another ai company which is rumoured to do something extremely dangerous. It pays doctors to treat the poor. Patients get free treatment. The doctors fee is paid by the startup. In return the doctor has to give the startup the entire medical history of the patient accompanied by a swab which is used to sequence the dna of the patient. The cost of the dna test is Rs 30,000. But when combined with medical history – it can be sold to global pharma for usd 100 per study. And resold 15-20 times.
And the poor man thought he was getting free medical care. The well meaning doctor got Rs 250. The genomics company spent Rs 30,250 and generated export income of Rs 150,000/-. Western companies then use this data to correlate genetic structure with disease incidence.
It didn’t stop there. During the covid outbreak, Intel Corpn approached the govt again offering ai to help in analysing covid data. What does Intel know about healthcare. But they all know a lot about data and its value in the ai age. There are no laws in India that seem to prevent this.
But this is all petty crime compared to the grand larceny of the Gates Foundation it seems.
Why ?? It’s a hard question to answer.
